Big Bertha

 

As you may recall from my previous post, after finding Andromeda, I celebrated by ordering the StellaLyra 8" Dobsonian. It is huge. We had clear skies tonight so i had to take it out for a test run.

The telescope itself is a joy to use, i can focus without the whole scope wobbling everwhere and hopping between targets is smooth and efforless.

If i have one niggle it is this. I am finsing the finderscope incredibly difficult to find targets. Not because it isnt set up correctly but because i am too used to just using a red dot finder. I will of course give it more time but i suspect I will be putting a red dot finder on it in the near future.

....

I viewed the easier targets tonight, Orions Nebula, Jupiter, Mars and Pleiades, all of which looked significantly better. The nebular was much more visible and showed faint hues of colour. Jupiters two main bandsshowed much more detail with hints of swirls at the edges and i could also make out 2 thinner and fainter bands at x133 magnification.

Mars was a huge improvement. It was still very birght, however there were hints of surface detail in hues of dark brown.